19.11.2019, 15:00, room 3945
Abstract:
Companies that sell products which are deployed in-field at customers sites, need to deal with the question of how to maintain them in case service from customers is requested. Depending on the maintained products, distinct demands for a remote maintenance solution exist. A vast variety of remote maintenance solutions which offer different features exist on the market. In order to provide suitable solutions for a given, real world use case of a particular company, specialized in developing and maintaining embedded industrial measurement systems, various remote maintenance solutions are examined. The company maintains a diverse amount of systems which are globally deployed on numerous customer sites. Due to the diversity of those systems, different challenges emerge. The systems are separated into two groups. One consists of an oversee-able amount of directly accessible devices over the internet whereas the other one consists of a larger amount of systems which are only locally accessible. The aim of this work is to provide an overview of possibly suitable remote maintenance solutions for the identified groups and determine the most promising ones. In order to achieve this, criteria based on use cases and requirements are defined. Tools and frameworks are researched and examined based on the criteria. The most promising solutions are selected. In order to present the selected tools, a more precise examination is conducted subsequently. Research showed that a discrepancy between the features promised by software publishers and the features actually available exists. For this reason, the selected tools are also deployed to test their capabilities. It is found that for both groups, none of the examined tools available to the market fulfilled all defined criteria. Consequently, for both groups, a combination of multiple tools is needed in order to cover all requirements set by the company.